TARGET 160224

WORLD RECORD
MENTHOS & COKE CHALLENGE



You probably know by now what happens when you drop a Mentos candy into a bottle of carbonated soda. A reaction takes place not unlike when you pour vinegar into a bowl of baking soda. The main difference is that with the Mentos and cola, the liquid is in a bottle where the only escape is through the narrow bottleneck. That causes a jet of foam to shoot out the top with force and speed.

Well, if you give anything that has force and speed to humans, they are going to get creative with it. So, simply dropping a Mentos candy into a bottle of cola is the ideal creativity-producing toy for humans.

It's also true that getting people to have fun with your product sells more product. So does getting your product to be a part of a Guiness World Record.


The setup for the world's record attempt

NOTE: I apologize for the low resolution quality of the pictures.
After exhaustive search, these were the best I could find.


So, on April 25, 2008, the Mentos company set up a world-record attempt at dropping candy into cola. They rented the Ladeuzeplein Plaza in the town of Leuven, Belgium, and set up tables with 1500 stations of Mentos and litre bottles of diet Coca Cola.



They also set up a demonstration booth and a stadium-sized closed circuit screen (to the left of the picture above) so they could show the participants who would be taking part how to do things creatively and have more fun doing it.


Volunteer participants came to be a part of the event.

1,499 students from the local university came to be a part of the world-record setting event, and an uncounted number of people came to observe.



The show began

At the start of the event, two "Coke and Mentos scientists" put on a performance, dropping Mentos into bottles of the diet Coka Cola and making the columns of rising foam perform to the accompanying music of a local disk-jockey.


Then, it was time to break a world record.

Then, the student participants donned rain gear that the Mentos company provided for the event - in Mentos purple, of course.


The countdown began

The participants opened their bottles of cola, and with the cap in one hand and the Mentos in the other, waited for the countdown so they could all start the fizz process at the same time. NOTE: It was important to replace the cap right after dropping the Mentos into the bottle because each cap had a small hole in it. This small hole made the opening that much smaller, so the force and speed of spewing would be that much greater.




And a world record was achieved.

When there is no accellerating cap, the height of a Mentos "fountain" is normally around 3 feet (1 meter). But with the caps in place, the highest column on this day was 29 feet (8.84 meters), setting a second world record to accompany the first.

NOTE: I could not find any account of the cleanup afterwards or whether or not the participants got to keep their raincoats, but the cleanup operation, getting all that cola smell and sticky syrup out of the stonework of the Plaza, in itself, would probably have made a third world record, and maybe even a good remote viewing Target of the Week.

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If you got impressions for which this feedback is insufficient, more information,
pictures and videos can be found at the following web sites:

Oddity Central
Gizmodo
The Daily Mail



Many thanks to Teresa Frish for slelecting this target for the Wednesday night free webinars she holds on a monthly basis. We at PSI use the targets she selects on this day so viewers will not wind up getting two different targets with the same set of coordinates. You can sign up for these free webinars at her web page under the option, "Online Classes & Discussions". Videos of all of Teresa's webinars are available on YouTube